My how fast the AI tech bros move to protect corporations but don’t move to protect the average coder, artists, writers.
Don’t worry! Its STILL okay to reverse engineer the work of photographers artists writers actors voice over musicians modelers animators academics etc etc (feel free to add. the exploitation is literally everywhere!)
Only if you’re a corporation! If you’re a filthy worker then you have no rights.
Corporations are people, my friend
Jokes on them when they face the consequences of usurping the jobs of all these professions, causing mass exit, and replacing with their error prone output of their slop and unoriginal thinking/artistry. I’m excited to see this outcome, not going to lie.
“It’s so powerful! You’re only allowed to use it how we want you to”.
Allowed eh? How about go fuck yourself?
Hot take:
This is a good thing.
Claude Code is the “lowest common denominator.” It’s the default, zero research option. Its where you go if you follow popular trends.
If you actually want to reverse engineer, help code a game or something, there are hundreds of capable, uncensored LLM APIs to do that. Hacker communities will eventually figure that out, and finally realize Claude isn’t unique, and that Anthropic is toxic.
But for lazy spammers who don’t know that and aren’t motivated to seek stuff out… well, if this makes their life more difficult, good. If this sabotages Anthropic, that’s good too.
Another reason not to use a closed models
When it hurts jobs, AI is the future, when it hurts rich friends needs moderation.
This was literally destroying indie games. Look at the deluge of slop that came out when ‘sort items onto shelves’ kicked off as a game type.
Indies have been copied since Unity introduced the asset store, don’t fool yourself, this is made to stop the reverse engineering of big company games and apps, not the little guy.
It’s interesting to see modern day “shovelware” is still around. The problem of shitty clones and rip offs of popular games has always been around. Or the classic bait and switch of advertising vs actual gameplay.
The proliferation of these things made possible through the internet and sites like itch.io and sped up by lazy AI slop has certainly made it even more pronounced. The difficulty of finding good indie games amongst a huge pile of trash has only grown.
That’s what late stage capitalism mixed with desperation, delusion, and the desire to get rich quick will get you though.
Now only the people that have enough money to pay for the privilege get to use it!!! Hurray?
That was always the plan
I can’t understand why anyone would play such a “game”. You’ll get more satisfaction and results from actually tidying your room!
The “There’s no way we can stop our agents from going rogue” people, suddenly have a burst of ability to reign in their creation when it suits their interests.
Funny that…
Does anyone think that perhaps what they are afraid is that source code of such clone would be compared to the original and show evidence that maybe the model was already trained on the code of the game?
I think this is definitely a concern, yes.
I think it’s very likely that these models are effectively being tricked into retrieving source code of projects from memory of seeing the actual source code in the biases. This is why some project are much easier to uncover than others.
They aren’t being tricked. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do
Fair fair. Ih suppose what I mean is that it’s not really reverse engineering so much as it is recollecting from training samples.
I’m no expert, but if my understanding of LLMs as ‘probability calculators’ is correct, then if you prompted one properly to produce code which does x (a Photoshop function for example) and it had only been trained on one example of this (the Photoshop source code) it would reproduce the PS source code because that has the highest probability of that being the correct ‘answer’.
This is baasically correct, though what the models actually produce is a little more randomized than that. Though, if there aren’t any words that are anywhere cllose to being likely to follow next, then there won’t be a any other valid options to choose.
Where would they get the source code from so they can include it in the training data in this scenario?
Looks like everywhere companies mandate employees to install copilot or equivalent.
I think originally they were saying they won’t be using the proprietary code for training, but I don’t trust those companies when they already broke laws.
From the stolen math research for tha NS, from the company response that they can’t guarantee that the model didn’t train on the mathematician sessions, we know for sure they are using the inputs for training lol
This is full conspiracy from me, but could the terms of service for github grant the right to “enhance tools” based on private github projects. These then get moved around as ‘anonymized’ data to train off?
The models don’t store access to their training data. So no, there’s no source code in the model to retrieve.
It’s long been proven that LLMs can produce exact copies of their training data. Not every piece of training data, of course, but enough where spitting out exact replicas of proprietary code is a legitimate concern. Not to mention that copies don’t need to be exact in order to be a problem.
The models are essentially a giant lossy compression applied to the training data.
They don’t store the loseless version of the training data sure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t reproduce something close enough to it, it’s literally how the whole thing works.
My understanding of it is that it’s far more complex than “lossy compression”. Of course it can generate text that is close to something in its training data, but I don’t think people have the right mental model if they think the model itself somehow has whole chunks of code in it. It does not.
My understanding of it is that it’s far more complex than “lossy compression”. Of course it can generate text that is close to something in its training data, but I don’t think people have the right mental model if they think the model itself somehow has whole chunks of code in it. It does not.
So why can they recreate entire articles from the New Yorker and complete functions from the training set? Don’t fall for the slop laundering.
I’ve never seen any proof of this? They can fetch data and present it as their own maybe? But models don’t store training data verbatim. It’s like 6+6 and 4+8 both = 12, but they just store 12 and how it got there is unknown.
I’ve never seen any proof of this? They can fetch data and present it as their own maybe? But models don’t store training data verbatim. It’s like 6+6 and 4+8 both = 12, but they just store 12 and how it got there is unknown.
Is this in response to that new “reverse engineer anything” tool from the people that reverse engineered the Adobe suite?
I’m really tired of the lie that ArtCraft is “reverse engineered Photoshop”.
It’s a slop factory. If you don’t believe me, download it and run it yourself. It’s just a frontend for tons of image and video GenAI bullshit. It doesn’t resemble Photoshop in the slightest, that narrative is pure marketing.
And it’s only “free” in the sense that you can download it for free. The first thing they ask you to do when you launch the program is buy tokens from them.
Even if it did work, Adobe’s legal team will obliterate them. I’m also not sure about the legality of using it for any paid work. It’s a moot point, though, since it’s slop, and better off using a cracked version that at least works.
of course. anyone who thinks AI can be used as a tool for independence is deluding themselves
anyone who thinks AI can be used by us commoners for much longer is deluding themselves. it is so obvious that these big LLM companies want to capture the market by making everyone dependent and then crank prices way up.
The adobe suite was not reverse engineered, in the sense in which the term is applied to binary, closed-source softeware. Rather, it was cloned.
This is technically and often also legally very different. Cloning is a new implementation of a system which reproduces the abstract API of an existing System. Since APIs are not subject to copyright law, this is legally unproblemaric. It is also a creative process (so far). For exsmple, Linux is a clone of AT & T Unix.
Reverse engineering uses techniques like analysing the internal behaviour and decompiling the binary code of an existing product. It is im general not illegal, but it can violate license agreements and is more in a grey area. Laws like the DMCA might also apply if some kind of copy protection is used.
BTW, many Linux drivers are reverse enginnered to some degree.
For exsmple, Linux is a clone of AT & T Unix.
Unless your definition of “clone” is very different from the mainstream one, you’re talking out of your ass here. Linux was written from scratch. The only thing they’ve got in common is being POSIX-compliant.
Yeah, it clones the Unix / POSIX API: Programs written for Unix will run on Linux. In the same way, the Photoshop/Office lookalikes are clones, they were written from scratch to yield a result compatible to the original.
Look at the explanations I linked.
It’s not ok when the commoners get some power back huh. What a shame, I’ve been loving playing my favorite console fps games as a kid, now with keyboard and mouse support.
So this is how these companies are going to safeguard against IP theft lawsuits! Leave our theft be, or we’ll tell everyone how to get in.
Also it’s incredibly telling how Anthropic doesn’t add code to stop suicide ideation in teens (what they are their ilk are being sued for) but can somehow very quickly stop reverse engineering. A tool that values the captial holders through & through. Their “democratization of intelligence” schtick is obvious now.
OpenSource frontier models ASAP! Obviously never gonna happen, but a fool can dream atleast.
Also it’s incredibly telling how Anthropic doesn’t add code to stop suicide ideation in teens (what they are their ilk are being sued for) but can somehow very quickly stop reverse engineering.
This.
Misanthropic: Characterized by a hatred or mistrustful scorn for humankind.
This is part of the reason they don’t want anyone running models locally offline, the models and their entire business are commoditized
- LLM bubble pops.
- Market gets flooded with $200b worth of hardware (this is how much is not used to Zitrons knowledge).
- ???
- Subscription based LLM gets cooked.
Government bales out AI companies and the bill they write to do it will make local LLMs illegal.
I think you are right, but that seems VERY unenforceable.
Successful enforcement doesn’t look like catching every pivate LLM owner.
Except the people I hear running “local models” report a lot of hardware, like a half dozen graphics cards. The common person is screwed, they have a smartphone.
Two or three years ago sure. Now…not even close. Tons of models run on basically shit now. Especially with MOEs. I run new lightweight models on an i9 and 64gb of ddr4 ram with a 4gb quadro card…in a laptop from 19’.
I think this is why a lot of these tech bros are saying silly shit about suggesting people need to rent from them. That’s their entire shtick. Otherwise they got nothing else.
Got some references and keywords for research?
This guy does a great brain dump on how little is needed to run LLMs on basically old junk.
If you’ve got at least 8 gigs of VRAM and at least 32 gigs of RAM you can run some pretty beefy Qwen models using Strata, far more than you normally could. Upgrade that to 12 or 16 and 64 gigs respectively and you can run a pretty decent quant of Qwen 3.8 flash next. It’s a LOT bigger than the usual 27 and 35 billion models people run locally that themselves require pretty beefy hardware. Strata is doing some magic by deciding which experts stay in VRAM vs which ones are in RAM vs which ones are so rarely used that they can just be read from the SSD as needed (though it’s best if you don’t have to result to the SSD as a backup option at all)
Piracy is illegal and they are of course doing a great job at stopping that…
Reverse engineering isn’t piracy
Unless you’re training your models…
Local LLMs will never be illegal, because that genie is out of the bag
Bails
With what money? No one is buying bonds. The US would have to print so hard it’d cause hyperinflation, which still means the bubble pops
The fed balance sheet gets bigger like it did with AIG.
Again, how? No one is buying American bonds right now. You can’t raise the debt if no one will loan you money
The federal debt and the US treasuries part of the fed balance sheet is how much taxes should increase. They’re different things, the fed can just buy bonds and put them on its balance sheet.
How much taxes should increase?
Wait, is this just printing money with extra steps? Cause it sounds a lot like printing money with extra steps
hardware that people cant USE, they are solely used for AI in those datacenters, its just going to be e-waste.
You used to be able to BIOS flash workstation GPUs to make them somewhat usable for gaming… not sure how far these AI GPUs have diverged from gaming cards these days and if a BIOS flash could make them playable.
They don’t even have headers for soldering a display output to them. They’re purely a compute card.
It’d work nicely as a pure accelerator for an actual GPU though, with the right firmware.
Almost back to the 3DFX pass-through days again… 😁
AI GPUs have specialized very heavily for neural networks, including things like going down to 8- or 4-bit floats in favor of more parallelization. Most of that hardware is just useless for graphics tasks at this point.
No it isn’t. 0h come on. Yeah thy couldn’t possibly take the same or similar hardware components and make them work in PCs.
They are already putting NPUs in PCs.
You’d have to start soldering the HBM and the GPU chips off the boards they’re on. Those aren’t PCI-E boards much of the time. Also, they don’t have display outputs.
I’d absolutely buy one of those servers to run open-weight models locally, but let’s not kid ourselves here: We’re talking about an ungodly amount of power for a single machine, think it was a few megawatts for a rack, or at least hundreds of kilowatts. A single server luckily should still be in two digit kilowatts. Could realistically only use it in the winter though.
I can. Compute is compute. Even if it’s extremely niche you give me enough cycles I’ll find something to run on it.
There is a geniuly cool idea floated a last year I think at xorg conf for a Linux driver that used GPGPU instructions to do the traditional GPU processing as well. So theoretically you could use some of the AI accell to instead compute things like rastors.
Those poor billionaire corpos! Why won’t somebody think of the poor billionaire corpos!?
A struggle for power.
They’re flailing at this point, personal computers are catching up to “good enough”.
Only the AI Bros are like “ackshully you need a zero data retention frontier server, check out my tokens” fuck off
Man, the one thing I was interested in, the decompiling of abandoned software to get old games and software back, is being limited.
I’m hopeful this is positive, they’ll start loosing a lot more to Chinese models and I can assure you local models will blow up too.
I can assure you local models will blow up too.
Why?
They are really good already, even if they have some kind of censored limitation, once you jailbreak it js jailed break for ever The only limitation right now is the poribitive gpu prices
The task Large Language Models are best at is pattern correlation. Out of all the possible applications, reverse-engineering seems the most reasonable use case to me.
But figuring out how stuff works is the exact opposite of what they want vibe coders to do: Don’t think, don’t train your own skills, just trust the machine. And if it doesn’t work, just prompt again and keep wasting more tokens, pushing the usage metrics to convince investors they’re constantly growing, burning the planet and your company’s money.
So they took out two of the most useful things that LLMs can do.
Yes, apparently they’re suddenly worried that stealing other people’s work—which is their business model—might backfire on them. I assume this is a measure intended to give the impression—in the face of one of the countless lawsuits against Anthropic—that they’re actually taking licensing or intellectual property rights seriously. I can’t think of any other explanation, because Anthropic simply can’t afford to have questions raised about where the training data used by their models actually comes from.
Pulling up the stolen ladder before anyone can steal it to use to steal more stuff while it’s still enforceable to do so.
Mabey just make all ladders illegal, unless you have a government contracted monopoly.
The entire idea of copyright is going to be tested at many levels, and most people don’t even understand why yet.
Interesting times.
Government contracted monopoly
You mean like when that town tried to force an xAI data center to not use methane turbines, and they got shut down by the government because the military was allegedly using Grok?
No, they just enabled Chinese LLMs to be the forefront of reverse engineering. Because people will do what they want to do.
No, they just enabled Chinese LLMs to be the forefront of reverse engineering. Because people will do what they want to do.
Their goal is simple… everything they are doing right now is striving to make the US ban individual hardware.
Chinese models are open, anyone can get them… stopping the flow of data on private computers is impossible. Hardware however is getting more expensive, hardware manufacturers are already deciding to move out of the consumer market on their own. The US government is already establishing laws to prevent shipping foreign hardware into the country.
Altman’s giving the game away when he does this “it’s so sad that all this ram is sitting around in people’s home computers unappreciated when it could do so much more in a data center”.
The idea is to sell the message "AI is out of the bag, and it’s world ending technology. Basically they are going to imply that the guardrails in their data centers are the only thing that’s preventing all AIs from destroying the software industry, and teaching teenagers to build bombs and hacking the CIA, and the only possible response would be to stop all direct to consumer hardware sales with anything more than the bare minimum needed to stream a PC out of a data center.
This is all pretty obvious and I agree. They can no longer protect their imaginary property if they allow it to be ran in your computer’s memory or stored on your computers hard drive.
The cat is definitely out of the bag, as in their own AI models are making them obselete. The race to make money before the end is what motivates them. They will ride the roller coaster to our societal demise because they only care about money. These people shouldn’t be in charge of a small fast food restaurant let alone multi-billion dollar companies.
If private hardware becoming scare would send America back to the stone age, completely choke technological progress.
probably, but don’t you know, everything in the cloud is the FuTuRe!! owning things yourself is the way of the past, it’s like physical disks you can resell or something.
Sad thing with the exception of price, it’s probably not that far off that most average people’s usages will be similar. but yeah the idea of paying by the hour or cpu grade etc… for a computer is going to suck… and be far more expensive for gamers, hobbyists etc…
deleted by creator
world ending technology.
Read that as “democratic and free word ending”, and it’s on purpose as they saw cyberpunk and wanted to become a mega-corporation that rules the world too.
mostly quoting their own people who are going out on the news and saying “yeah we really believe that there’s maybe a 10% chance we destroy the world with this”.
Just ran into Qwen’s version of guardrails myself, and am quite annoyed. Guess I’m gonna have to look into abliterated models next.
Oh, abliterated models are awesome! Just be aware that they’re a little too agentic at times. Once they start ignoring guardrails, they happily keep ignoring them!
My concern at the moment is I’ve heard some of them have performance issues due to the abliteration process. What’s your experience with that?
Like, TTFT? Or speed of tokens? Or something else? BTW what was the gate you initially hit with Qwen?
Some abliterated models had lower reliability and quality, I heard. Is that still an issue, or has the dev community figured out how to avoid those pitfalls?
Was spitballing about various ideas, and occasionally Qwen would go all Chinese-ethical on me, no using open systems outside of stated design, no avoiding govt blocklists, etc etc.
depends on what their base model is. Most abliterated models start off with an already quantized model, so depending on the type and level of quantization, you’ve already lost some capability. Plus, I think there are two types of abliteration, so ymmv.
My current go tos, in order are -
- eriktonon/gemma4-uncensored:26b-a4b
- orcarouter/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored:iq2_xxs
- hf.co/HauhauCS/Gemma-4-E4B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive:Q6_K_P
I’ve tried and hated - hf.co/DavidAU/L3.1-Dark-Reasoning-Dark-Planet-Hermes-R1-Uncensored-Horror-Imatrix-MAX-8B-GGUF:latest
If you’re set on trying out Qwen, I highlugh recomment orcarouter’s models. Very well done and they start off with a good base model - well, actually now that I think about it, Qwen3.8 basically has one base model - the 27b one, right? So that’s that.
I like the Gemma-4-E4B for speed for response, and HauhauCS has done a good job of abliterating the model appropriately. However, it’s nothing compared to the A4B models, so if your hardware can take it, go for A4B over E4B always.
Rules for thee!
